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Impact of DU Weapons

- Major Doug Rokke PhD Health Physics

The War Against Ourselves by Doug Rokke

An interview with Major Doug Rokke by Sunny Miller

Doug Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally trained as
a forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he was assigned to
prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical
warfare, and sent to the Gulf. What he experienced has made him a
passionate voice for peace, travelling the country to speak out. The
following interview was conducted by the director of the Traprock Peace
Center, Sunny Miller, supplemented with questions from YES!

QUESTION: Any viewer who saw the war on television had the impression
this was an easy war, fought from a distance and soldiers coming back
relatively unharmed. Is this an accurate picture?

ROKKE: At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back to the
United States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty count of 760:
294 dead, a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the casualty rate now
for Gulf War veterans is approximately 30 percent. Of those stationed in
the theater, including after the conflict, 221,000 have been awarded
disability, according to a Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued September
10, 2002.

Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium
munitions friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces.

We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium dust, anybody
working in and around uranium contamination, and anyone within a
vehicle, structure, or building that’s struck with uranium munitions.
That’s thousands upon thousands of individuals, but not only US troops.
You should provide medical care not only for the enemy soldiers but for
the Iraqi women and children affected, and clean up all of the
contamination in Iraq.

And it’s not just children in Iraq. It’s children born to soldiers
after they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding
uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you’ve got uranium in
the semen, the genetics are messed up. So when the children were
conceived—the alpha particles cause such tremendous cell damage and
genetics damage that everything goes bad. Studies have found that male
soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have
a child with a birth defect and female soldiers almost three times as
likely.

Q: You have been a military man for over 35 years. You served in
Vietnam as a bombardier and you are still in the US Army Reserves. Now
you’re going around the country speaking about the dangers of depleted
uranium (DU). What made you decide you had to speak publicly about DU?

ROKKE:Everybody on my team was getting sick. My best friend John
Sitton was dying. The military refused him medical care, and he died.
John set up the medical evacuation communication system for the entire
theater. Then he got contaminated doing the work.

John and Rolla Dolph and I were best friends in the civilian world,
the military world, forever. Rolla got sick. I personally got the order
that sent him to war. We were both activated together. I was given the
assignment to teach nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare and make
sure soldiers came back alive and safe. I take it seriously. I was sent
to the Gulf with this instruction: Bring ‘em back alive. Clear as could
be. But when I got all the training together, all the environmental
cleanup procedures together, all the medical directives, nothing
happened.

More than 100 American soldiers were exposed to DU in friendly fire
accidents, plus untold numbers of soldiers who climbed on and entered
tanks that had been hit with DU, taking photos and gathering souvenirs
to take home. They didn’t know about the hazards.

DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10 pounds of
solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It
is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank
because of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit,
it’s like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw
tremendous burns, tremendous injuries. It was devastating.

The US military decided to blow up Saddam’s chemical, biological, and
radiological stockpiles in place, which released the contamination back
on the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The chemical
agent detectors and radiological monitors were going off all over the
place. We had all of the various nerve agents. We think there were
biological agents, and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities.
It was a toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to this whole mess.

When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in northern
Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours. Respiratory
problems, rashes, bleeding, open sores started almost immediately.

When you have a mass dose of radioactive particulates and you start
breathing that in, the deposit sits in the back of the pharynx, where
the cancer started initially on the first guy. It doesn’t take a lot of
time. I had a father and son working with me. The father is already dead
from lung cancer, and the sick son is still denied medical care.

Q:Did you suspect what was happening?

ROKKE:We didn’t know anything about DU when the Gulf War started. As
a warrior, you’re listening to your leaders, and they’re saying there
are no health effects from the DU. But, as we started to study this, to
go back to what we learned in physics and our engineering—I was a
professor of environmental science and engineering—you learn rapidly
that what they’re telling you doesn’t agree with what you know and
observe.

In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick.
Respiratory problems and the rashes and neurological things were
starting to show up.

Q: Why didn’t you go to the VA with a medical complaint?

ROKKE:Because I was still in the Army, and I was told I couldn’t
file. You have to have the information that connects your exposure to
your service before you go to the VA. The VA obviously wasn’t going to
take care of me, so I went to my private physician. We had no idea what
it was, but so many good people were coming back sick.

They didn’t do tests on me or my team members. According to the
Department of Defense’s own guidelines put out in 1992, any excretion
level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result
in immediate medical testing, and when you get up to 250 micrograms of
total uranium excreted per day, you’re supposed to be under continuous
medical care.

Finally the US Department of Energy performed a radiobioassay on me
in November 1994, while I was director of the Depleted Uranium Project
for the Department of Defense. My excretion rate was approximately 1500
micrograms per day. My level was 5 to 6 times beyond the level that
requires continuous medical care.

But they didn’t tell me for two and a half years.

Q:What are the symptoms of exposure to DU?

ROKKE:Fibromyalgia. Eye cataracts from the radiation. When uranium
impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust and pieces
of uranium explode all over the place. This can be breathed in or go
into a wound. Once it gets in the body, a portion of this stuff is
soluble, which means it goes into the blood stream and all of your
organs. The insoluble fraction stays—in the lungs, for example. The
radiation damage and the particulates destroy the lungs.

Q: What kind of training have the troops had, who are getting called
up right now—the ones being shipped to the vicinity of what may be the
next Gulf War?

ROKKE:As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed a
40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has been shelved. They
turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that’s full of distortions.
It doesn’t deal with the reality of uranium munitions.

The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified
that the gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits leak.
Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects can
be fixed with duct tape.

Q:If my neighbors are being sent off to combat with equipment and
training that is inadequate, and into battle with a toxic weapon, DU,
who can speak up?

ROKKE: Every husband and wife, son and daughter, grandparent, aunt
and uncle, needs to call their congressmen and cite these official
government reports and force the military to ensure that our troops have
adequate equipment and adequate training. If we don’t take care of our
American veterans after a war, as happened with the Gulf War, and now
we’re about ready to send them into a war again—we can’t do it. We can’t
do it. It’s a crime against God. It’s a crime against humanity to use
uranium munitions in a war, and it’s devastating to ignore the
consequences of war.

These consequences last for eternity. The half life of uranium 238 is
4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the place in Iraq.

We also bombarded Vieques, Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation for
the war in Kosovo. That’s affecting American citizens on American
territory. When I tried to activate our team from the Department of
Defense responsible for radiological safety and DU cleanup in Vieques, I
was told no. When I tried to activate medical care, I was told no.

The US Army made me their expert. I went into the project with the
total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because
I’m a warrior. What I saw as director of the project, doing the research
and working with my own medical conditions and everybody else’s, led me
to one conclusion: uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for
eternity, and medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the
US or the Canadians or the British or the Germans or the French but for
the American citizens of Vieques, for the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa,
of Scotland, of Indiana, of Maryland, and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.

Q:If your information got out widely, do you think there’s a
possibility that the families of those soldiers would beg them to
refuse?

ROKKE:If you’re going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you know
you’re going to wear gas masks and chemical protective suits that leak,
and you’re not going to get any medical care after you’re exposed to all
of these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.
You’ve got to start peace sometime.

Q: It does sound remarkable for someone who has been in the military
for 35 years to be talking about when peace should begin.

ROKKE: When I do these talks, especially in churches, I’m reminded
that these religions say, “And a child will lead us to peace.” But if we
contaminate the environment, where will the child come from? The
children won’t be there. War has become obsolete, because we can’t deal
with the consequences on our warriors or the environment, but more
important, on the noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the
contamination and the health effects of war can’t be cleaned up because
of the weapons you use, and medical care can’t be given to the soldiers
who participated in the war on either side or to the civilians affected,
then it’s time for peace.